


Gnossienne No.1

by shadow_in_the_shade



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Gnosticism, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Inspired by Music, Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-19
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-07-14 13:04:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16041035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadow_in_the_shade/pseuds/shadow_in_the_shade
Summary: Some thoughts on Missy playing Gnossienne No.1 by Satie during "Lie of the Land". I've tried to write a fic that follows the pattern of the piece of the music while having Missy contemplate a whole bunch of stuff while alone in the vault.This may become a series around other pieces of music or it may not.





	Gnossienne No.1

 

**Gnossienne No 1**

 

Her first argument against her own own chain of reasoning would be that she was not, like that poor beast, trapped within a labyrinth. But as soon as she unwinds one thought, the loop of the next chases after it. _But I am, s_ he thinks, and it is barely even metaphor because the labyrinth is so obvious to her; well it always is from the inside, at least when you've been inside for long enough.

 

When you're trapped within one place, tiny variations take on the most extreme importance, until they transcend the walls and you're gone; not hurtling out, not breaking through but falling in, dropping back into your own head like drowning, except it goes on forever. She wonders to the point of knowing that you could – if you could unravel the whole universe this way, through a thousand years studying the shifting landscape of one small space. Travel could never broaden the mind, never see you towards finding yourself; only introspection even begins to stand a chance. You can see more in one room in a lifetime than if you spent that lifetime travelling the world. Poor Theta, always looking out not in; at this rate he'll never know himself, never be able to stop running from that lack of the most vital of understandings. She at least stands a chance.

 

The first notes play like steps inside; tentative, probing – is it dark within the labyrinth walls? It must be. Surely the Minotaur in his raging has knocked over all attempts at torches. She wonders if he has burn scars. Yes of course. Of course he does. Monsters always do. Perhaps it is why they are monsters. Perhaps it is just why they are seen as monsters, because everyone hates what is ugly and they have decided that scars are ugly. But the decision of others that you are a monster is not what makes you one, is it? Maybe after all monsters are assumed, not born, not made unless they are made out of those assumptions. She wonders if it was the way the Minotaur looked or the things that he did that led the decisions to be made against him. Well he _did_ eat people. There's not _no_ sense in the labyrinth- prison. Philosophy is all very well but Society Must Be Protected. (!)

 

_(but then who protects the monsters the monsters cry in small muffled voices behind the walls built to keep them out)_

 

Anyway. Theseus. The yarn is awkward in his warrior hands; he fumbles as he makes a loop and hooks it tight to the door. It's an intricate door by a master craftsman, the locks and bolts intertwine like weaving; such a precise ritual pattern of locks and bolts. She wonders what the outside of her own prison looks like (she's being whimsical – she does not usually think of it as a prison; she is half made of whimsy (half whimsy half shadow, half anger half calm, half coherent thought half marzipan, we are all made up of a hundred thousand halves, man is not one but two and all that, not one but a million more like, not just man but woman – well she's not man or woman even if she does favour the feminine pronoun at this time.) The mind is made of digression, it's made of spool after spool of thread unravelling through it's corridors and the corridors themselves always growing, lengthening, twisting. That's why the labyrinth.

 

She pictures the thread as blue. A bright cobalt blue unsporting in the dark, casting a blue light through the tunnels that before were dull red with the embers that remain in the sconces, black on the golden walls. Does the Minotaur see beauty, she wonders, but if he did would he have to see everything, would he have to take it in? So much to see, so many colours and shapes and then from seeing to feeling to hurting to overloading on the sensations of taking it all in. From beauty to ugliness to everything; to see, to really see even one thing is to begin to see it all. It drives you mad, it has to. That's why you need to follow the thread, spilling down in rhythmic tumbling half – notes.

 

On the second phrase that is not really the second – and you can't tell how many bars in it is, even, because this is Satie – anyway, it's that lower B Flat that heralds a switch in the perspective of the story and this is where the Monster takes over the narrative – that's one way you could see this, she thinks, fingers sliding over keys, fingers faking laziness, flattening idly into their tumbles. She wonders why they call them keys, wonders what they open – prisons have keys, at least that's what you think – hers doesn't, did the labyrinth at Knossos? _By my crooked teeth,_ she thinks, and tries to picture what that key would have looked like, what her own key would look like. She's never seen the outside of her own door; she was asleep when she came in. _Well, we're all asleep,_ she thinks – until some-one else comes in with us. The Minotaur's footfalls echo in the response, red footprints pattering across the black of the dark between the walls. This is where monsters are supposed to live, in the dark between the walls, inside the cracks in our own heads, this is where we lie, not sleeping after all, just waiting.

 

But it's not; she plays the monster's parts with more vigour than the hero's. She's not just waiting, _da-DUM –_ she's not sleeping – _da-DUM –_ as _if_ she would spend all this time just pacing the walls, just waiting for someone to break up the tedium of solitude. There's no tedium in solitude; the inside is endless, the labyrinth never stops growing, a mind far far bigger on the inside than even her species could imagine and the threads fall in loops from a reel that never runs empty.

 

Hero invades. Monster responds. Then they meet and the music rises, climbing in a gasping ascent that falls before it can quite become orgasmic. The fall is horrible, her fingers stumble over it and her senses slacken, the foot presses down too long on the pedal, sustaining the F on the left hand a little too long as though that could keep the climb from ending like this. It never does. She always falls. She feels a disappointment in herself with every motion as the music descends. She's trying, she has, but it looks like nothing. She _wants_ hope. She wants witness. She wants reward. How can anyone help it.

 

This here. This small space has become the world and the music fills it, all adventure and penetration and death and pacing. It pushes at the walls, unravels the world from this one tight point that is her being, creating itself from the inside out. My world is me. How I sense it, what I feel, what I hops for, want, expect. It's the way I play, the way I feel it, the way I lie. She does not _hear_ one note of the music, too much to do in reading it, in unravelling the story that it tells.

 

Hero and monster. Meet and fight, pace, suspect, probe and rage and round and round in endless circles, the same story told again and again with the most minor variations that play out so important, one stumble and the structure comes crashing down; music is an equation and one number misplaced creates a wrong answer, leaves the issue open. She plays to fix something but does not dare listen in case it actually works.

 

 _After all, wasn't there a time when all I heard was music? Drumbeats in the dark, in a night that never ended and the darkness could never lighten because the drumbeats could never end._ She sleeps a lot these days, making up for a restless noisy lifetime. She plays to fill the silence but is not sure she wants it filled.

 

She likes the way it ends because the monster gets the last word, undoubted, unquestioned, and the fates of all concerned are still in question, and that's good probably. Better this way. Mostly she likes it because _well that's me, I get the last word. I win._ She thinks perhaps it feels like winning; she's not sure.

 

Does the music still play if nobody can hear? She wonders if it sounds different the minute she knows someone is listening? If it does, is it because she plays differently or because everyone will hear it differently, read a different story, see a different purpose. She knows he knows how she sees it, he must know it's no accident that she plays the hero's entrance (the murderer's entrance) when he comes in.

_I thought you had some kind of monster in here._

 

_I do._

 

And he meets her eye and she smiles – yes, he knows.

 

He says it as though he keeps her and she wonders if he really thinks that; she wonders which he thinks he is, Midas who decreed that that creature be locked up, Daedalus, who constructed the prison, or Theseus with his hypocrisy of goodness.

 

And he circles her and she paces and they can neither of them keep still for tension when her unravelling world runs into his and the pictures the threads make run together and colours crash and their worlds create themselves in a sudden shattering rush above the usual gentle unspooling of colour. The labyrinth lights up and they come alive rushing through the corridors together throwing out threads in a rainbow of colour and maybe that's love, when two worlds overlap, when just for a moment the map of your mind in all its twists and turns can be laid over the map of someone else's and have at least some of the patterns of those corridors match up – maybe that's good enough for love, though the word is weak.

 

She likes the Satie, though it troubles her, good talks to bad and bad replies and back and forth and back and forth with so many repetitions and minor changes that it's hard to say any more which it was that was _good_ and which _bad._ You can't take two people and say one is one and one the other. You can't even take a hero and a monster. It's ridiculous. But _he's_ ridiculous, and he thinks he knows the difference which is _why_ he's ridiculous. He thinks he knows goodness, but he's vain, arrogant and sentimental.

 

Oh yes, after their dance, after the back and forth, the hot and the cold, she gets the last word. The monster always does.

 

__x__

 

**'k, that happened. I've been learning Gnossienne no 1 on the piano (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLFVGwGQcB0> – for anyone who wants to know cause probably this whole ficlet makes no sense without it idk) - (and honestly I was even before I found out it was what Missy was playing in Lie of The Land!) and then I was reading about it apparently telling the Minotaur story and this gave me a whole lot of thoughts about the Doctor calling Missy a monster just after hearing her play it and thoughts about labyrinths and monsters and vaguely gnosticism in general and since it was all pretty vague I wrote a fic instead of a bunch of meta and this is it :-)**

 

**I may write more music inspired bits of nonsense to add to this or I may not :-)**

 


End file.
